My friend SSMW and I are trying to convince a friend of ours to start a blog in conjunction with her proposed on-line soup-selling business. She was skeptical, so I made her a pretend soup blog (splog) to try to convince her.

Speaking of blogging and selling things, you think this is only for people sitting around in their jam-jams? Au contraire, Pierre! Here is a woman named Debbie Weil, who wrote a book about how to start a corporate blog. And of course, she has a blog herself.

I liked this article from the front page of the Chicago Tribune today: Ego Surfers Count Their 15 Seconds of Cyberfame. Excerpt: There is even a term--ego surfing--to describe the phenomenon of people who constantly monitor for new responses to comments posted on a message board, or who check over and over to see how many viewers have logged onto their photo display at Flickr.com.This infatuation over one's standing in the digital age is an outcropping of the most unique and basic attributes of the Internet--its ability to count. It is also a reflection of how the Web has evolved into a culture in which participation is encouraged and opinions matters.

This will be an interesting CD: Baghdad Music Journal by WATIV. WATIV is William A. Thompson IV. Mr. Thompson is an active duty national guardsman in Iraq. All About Jazz excerpt: My name is William A. Thompson IV. I am a jazz pianist and composer from New Orleans, La. But much has changed for me. I have generated a project that will be of interest. In April of 2004, I was activated in the La National Guard to serve one Year in Iraq as a Counter Intelligence Agent. I’ve been in Baghdad since October of 2004. I was at first horrified by the notion of this deployment and the seemingly, end of my music career. However, I have come to view this deployment as a unique musical odyssey. Since my deployment I have put together a sizable portfolio of compositions, which I’ve recorded with various software and my fully weighted, 88 keys, keyboard. I mainly use Logic 7, Reason, and an I pod for sampling. The music is unique considering that I have included samples, which I have recorded here in Baghdad. These samples include Iraqi dialogue concerning political issues and all else. I have transcribed the pitches of such samples and composed music based on their contents. There are many other “war samples” to be found in my music.NPR interview here. This guy doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia page yet; Maybe I can make him one this weekend.

Monday, August 28, 2006

ST:TAS; Quills; Police A-Caddied-Me; Immigration Forever

The Quill Award nominees were announced almost a week ago. I hate to be discouraging, but there have only been two edits to the Quills' Wikipedia page since June, and one of those was by a robot. When you put out a list of books (actually, a list of anything) and you can't get Wikipedians to jump on it, there might be a slight problem.

Make sure to get any cracked car windows taken care of if you're planning on going to Baltimore anytime soon.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Far-Out Advertisement on Postcard

Cleaning out more shelves, I found this trippy holographic postcard, postmarked July 1968 and addressed to my grandmother. It was an advertisement for Hudson's Department Store. I can't envision my grandmother being prompted to make purchases based on this image. What hidden meanings were recipients left to construe? BTW, Grandma never threw anything away either.

Roundup of "Darknet" Topics

I'm almost through with An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds, and it fits in well with three other books I've read in the past few months (The Long Tail, Everything Bad Is Good for You, and Darknet) -- All of them are pro-tech, pro-capitalism, pro-democracy, pro-Net, and generally optimistic. All of these things are appealing to me. (I am a long-term optimist and a short-term pessimist. In other words, I believe that North Korea will move towards significant capitalist reforms during my lifetime, but I just know I'm going to find cat barf in the living room before I even get out of bed.)

For whatever reasons, Darknet, by J.D. Lasica, had the most references of the four to people, things, and events that I had previously either not known about, or of which I didn't know as much as I wanted to. Below are some bullets of things covered in that book that caught my attention (Although Lasica himself has beaten me to it by having posted a miniature version of the book online):

There's a guy featured in the book named Bruce Forest, who is a professional, very sophistiated hacker-for-hire. The major Hollywood studios have him on contract to traffic in illegal copies of their films via various Internet communities so that he can then report back to them on ways they can plug leaks. Funny thing about Mr. Forest... since the book came out, he got arrested for setting off some bombs in some of the small Connecticut residential areas near which he lives.

Another guy (who doesn't seem to have blown anything up, as far as I can tell) in the book is named Philip Gaines, and Mr. Gaines is a big fan of the short-lived libertarian sci-fi TV drama Firefly. Without really asking the Fox Network, he created and circulated a two-DVD set of excerpts from the show with his analysis and comments on a voice track, intended for the edification of other fans. Good links here; NYT article here. NYT excerpt: But for the true completist, there's another option out there: a handmade DVD created by Philip B. Gaines, a graduate student in digital media at the University of Washington. On this small, white two-disc set, Mr. Gaines puts forth his own idiosyncratic take on "Firefly," scrolled over montages of stills and short excerpted scenes. His production includes episode summaries and visual mini-essays on subjects like "irony" and "violence." He timed his project to piggyback on the official "Firefly" DVD (released by 20th Century Fox Home Video), touting his production on the geek-news site Slashdot.com. His discs are a charmingly ungainly valentine to the show — more experiment than true collectible. But they do offer a glimpse of a new possibility, the fan's-eye approach to the television DVD.

Jed Horovitz sounds like an interesting guy. He made a documentary called Willful Infringement, which takes on the whole bugaboo of copyright law. Excerpt: Over the last two hundred years, western law has turned ideas into something called Intellectual Property. At the same time, we have created the idea of a corporation as a property owner. The rise of digital media technologies and the Internet have brought these two developments into sharp focus. The nexus of these developments has produced some unintended consequences and as a result, copyright has become the 'killing fields' of culture.

Newsweek profile on the godfather of the DVD, Warren Lieberfarb. Excerpt: Since it was introduced in the spring of 1997, the small silver platter he championed has transformed Hollywood and the way the world watches movies. Lieberfarb's dead-on hunch—that the masses would buy DVDs, not just rent them—helped ignite the greatest boom in Hollywood history, fundamentally altering the economics of filmmaking. Nowadays movie theaters merely begin the buzz for DVDs.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

IKEA; Cupcakes; CD Box Sets; Monster Restaurant

Items:

Yesterday I had my first visit to IKEA. They have some really nifty stuff. I'm working on contemplating how to re-organizemyoffice, and I'm probably going to make use of some of their merchandise; just not sure exactly what or how. Here's their Wikipedia page. Wiki excerpt on the origin of the name: IKEA was founded in Älmhult, Sweden in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, then 17. The company name is a composite of the first letters in his name in addition to the first letters of the names of the property and the village in which he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. This acronym is incidentally similar to the Greek word οικία [oikia] (home) and to the Finnish word oikea (correct, right). I wonder how The Museum of Useful Things compares?

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

A Few Things

A few quick things:

Annalee Newitz writes about female robots in Popular Science Magazine. Excerpt: But as women’s social roles shifted in real life, so did those of their machine counterparts. In the 1970s, women had broken away from their Robby the Robot–style roles in the home and embraced the feminist movement, which led to a crop of fembot protest movies. The most famous of these is The Stepford Wives (1975), a fable in which men replace their uppity wives with obedient, beautiful robots who love cooking, cleaning and sex. Meanwhile, Forbes writer Michael Noer wants to know why can't there be a Stepford resurgence.

The ♥G♥ got hold of some railroad ties and we put them in the backyard in a square so that she can work on a garden. Here's a garden blog I came across for her for reference and links.

I'm not sure what I think about the announcement that the new Survivor series will organize tribes by ethnicity. It's not necessarily as bad as it sounds... the last season started them off arranged by age and gender (older men, older women, younger men, younger women). It could turn out to be quite interesting. Update: As has just occurred to me, it could turn out even more interesting if they let Jeff Probst sit this one out and have Sen. George Allen take on hosting duties.

Monday, August 21, 2006

SoaP2: Snakes on Apollonius of Perga

OK, so I've been saying for a while that I'm going to write an international thriller in which Michelangelo is found to have hidden a secret message in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or something. It's totally a coincidence that whatshisname came out with TDVC (or as I call it, "Tom Clancy Goes to a Museum") before I could get my draft done.

However, I have now noticed that someone is coming out with a book called "The Machiavelli Covenant" later this year, in which the president of the United States flees a secret White House cabal that has ordered the assassination of some European heads of state. Regarding this cabal, it turns out that: The group’s origins go back 500 years. In the 16th century, the dying Machiavelli fashioned a sinister work entitled, The Covenant—an ominous plan for gaining true power and keeping it. For centuries this wealthy, despotic order has hidden the plan away, inspired and emboldened by its bloody insights and near-preternatural power. Bonded by vicious rites and ritual slaughter, dedicated to their vision of global rule, they have over the centuries prospered beyond dreams of greed and domination. Three people now stand between the Brotherhood and its final apocalyptic conquest.

Hmmm... It looks like I need to rework my whole paradigm here. I think I'm going to have to draw from The Great Books of the Western World to do what I really have in mind... It could be a series, and each volume in The Canon could hide a different conspiracy.

I haven't got all the details down yet, but it opens with a plays-by-his-own-rules Chicago homicide detective (his ex-wife has a Ph.D. in Humanities) pulling up to the scene, and finding Mortimer Adler with his throat cut, alone in a room locked from the inside. The rest writes itself.

Daily M*th*rf*ck*ng Show on You M*th*rf*ck*ng Tube!

What I've Been Watching Lately

A few things I've seen recently, either from Netfix, the Library, or whatever...

Battle Royale II -- Certainly worth seeing if you liked the original (which I did), especially due to the new twists of how the detonating electronic collars were set up. They did some very deliberate Saving-Private-Ryanesque scenes, which, with the new twist (I'm not going to get into spoilers) were quite effective. However, the whole "message" thing got to be quite preachy. In a couple of scenes, they paid a lot of attention to a long list of countries that the United States has bombed in the last 60 years. They started out "Japan. China. North Korea." and went on through Afghanistan. I was like "Hey - Time out!" The whole reason we bombed Japan (BRII is a Japanese movie, in case you didn't know) was that Japan attacked us, and then wouldn't surrender because their emperor was actually God. And as for a Japanese film purporting to criticize any sort of U.S. military action against China... -- Fuck that noise! Somebody needs to read the late Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking and then do a book report for the class. So for BRIII, let's skip the preaching and get back to the Lord of the Flies/Survivor/Most Dangerous Game mashup, and figure out some new angles of complexity to throw into it. (Maybe get some snakes and put them all on a plane together, something like that?)

American Experience:Benjamin Franklin (Not from the American Experience series, I now realize) -- Watched the first half the other day, finishing the second half tonight/tomorrow (I think). Quite clever and thorough. Lots of competent Franklin biographers and Colonial/Revolution historians (including Thomas Fleming, H.W. Brands, and Gordon Wood, among others) sharing comments, interspersed with actors reading historical documents in character.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room -- This documentary, based on the book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, helped me kind of understand exactly what occured. I think this movie got a little preachy too, in terms of condemning unbridled capitalism. IMHO, the problem with Enron wasn't capitalism, it was that they committed crimes that threw a monkey wrench into capitalism, and bullied other companies into going along with them. Free-market prophet Milton Friedman specifically states that part of what makes capitalism work is the guarantee of protections against fraud. (Get it? "Prophet"?) (Prof. Friedman also points out that the government didn't uncover the Enron scandal, but the market (in the form of one of the competing business-news magazines) did.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

I Am Now Officially a Gnarls Barkley Fan

I've been out of the loop for a while (sorry, I'm over 30) and I've been meaning to check out Gnarls Barkley. It's official -- I'm a fan! I like the Zeligesque video below for "Smiley Faces," and I like both the original and the SpongeBob version of "Crazy." Also, I guess they have multiple videos for each of those songs. Official website here.

Meanwhile, his opponent Jim Webb is a pretty interesting guy. He was one of the people profiled in the excellent book The Nightingale's Song, about five graduates of the Naval Academy whose careers took them through the Vietnam War and on into careers in Washington. (The others were John McCain, Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, and Oliver North.) Here's a 1995 Booknotes interview with author Robert Timberg. Timberg excerpt from that interview: Jim Webb was a platoon leader, a rifle platoon commander and he was also a company commander. He won the Navy Cross, which is the nation's second highest award for battlefield gallantry after the Congressional Medal of Honor. The Marine Corps very rarely awards the Congressional Medal of Honor to anybody that survives the experience. He won two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, several Purple Hearts. Webb is one of the toughest people I've ever met and remains so to this day. And yet -- and Webb was a superb Marine, but in one -- and this sort of in some ways lays a base line for what a lot of Vietnam veterans brought home with them and that -- during one two-month period, he had 56 of his men either killed or wounded. It was this grisly alchemy of war. It just turned his men into statistics. And Webb has -- he has never forgotten his men. He has never forgotten their names. He is perhaps a man who has been closer to his men than any officer -- you know, years later -- to this day --than anybody I know.

(Note: The Booknotes site seems to be having some problems today. Here's the Google cache, if you can't get the original.)

Friday, August 18, 2006

The Google Image Quiz is beautiful and addictive in its simplicity. If you have an hour free, give it a try.

Smash-Up Derby seems like a cool band. They specialize in taking the lyrics to one song and putting them to the music of another song, possibly of a genre counterintuitively related to the genre of the first. For instance, here's their take on Talking Heads + Franz Ferdinand.

I really like these Lichtensteinian images; I particularly like the fact that that page has a detailed tutorial on how to create them w/ photoshop.

Last but not least, looks like everybody's getting in on Snakes-on-a-mania. And I mean everybody! UPDATE, 8/19/06: The ♥G♥ swears to me that last night, shortly after going to sleep, I tossed and turned and said something to the effect of "Get them off of me! Get these snakes off me!" -- I have no recollection of this incident.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

MRQE Revamped; Beetle in the Red Zone; Proofreading

Several things:

If you haven't used the Movie Review Query Engine recently (or ever) you ought to check out its new look. From "What's New?" page: What's new? In short, everything! Well, not everything. MRQE's index of movie reviews, updated daily since late 1993, is still front and center, but now it's been enhanced with the indexing of news and weblog articles. We've also introduced movie forums, where registered users can join the conversation. There are forums available on a variety of topics, and for every movie title. (Why not sign up now?) Registered users can also subscribe to MRQE Matinée, the twice-weekly newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on new film and DVD releases. And oh, by the way, we made some changes to the site's look-and-feel. :-) Enjoy --Stewart M. Clamen, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

I like this Comic Strip Doctor feature from Wondermark: An Illustrated Jocularity very much. Lots of good commentary, followed by adjustments of various newspaper cartoons. Excerpt followed by example: By keeping the spirit of the characters and setting -- it's a beautiful day; Beetle and Plato are clearly enjoying lounging in it; Zero, as usual, is clueless -- we can subtly interject a bit of topicality and, at the same time, draw the character traits into sharper focus. In our version, Zero doesn't have to be just two-dimensionally "dumb," whereby people call him dumb and that comprises his character; he can actually be an individual over his head in a situation that he honestly does not know how to comprehend.

Original Strip

Modification

I'm thinking about looking into this Project Gutenberg program, in which volunteers proof classic texts in public domain before they are posted as e-books. Excerpt: This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of Public Domain books into Project Gutenberg e-books. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/e-book creation process.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

P!nk Problems; Dava Sobel; Bill O'Reilly Controversies; Free Trade

I dug up a bunch of overgrown thistle stalks and giant leaves (long story) in the back corner of the yard (ow - sore vertebrae...) while The ♥G♥ touched up the last of the trim on the back of the house. Now I'm sitting in bed while we watch the American Experience doc on Benjamin Franklin.

Looks like P!nk may have used the !ntellectual property of a (now-deceased) artist in New Zealand in her last video. Now the clothing company that owns the rights to his material wants to sue. Dude! It's free advertising! Instead of bringing legal action, why not fly out to Cali and give her a bunch of his other stuff so she can use it in more of her videos so more P!nkophiles in the U.S. and abroad will want to buy your products? Duh. That's like the creator of leg warmers wanting to have sued Olivia Newton-John. (BTW, we listened to P! while pa!nt!ng the house today.)

Like I've said plenty of times before, I'm a diehard Free Trader -- Here's a good summary of how come. One of these days I need to rewrite my first-ever internet post (from one of the AOL message boards in the late 90s) about how the Boston Tea Party has been hijacked by "Fair Trade"rs and how their whole thing was they could have just been happy buying tea had it been allowed to be traded freely (not "fairly" -- who decides what is fair?).

Technology Review weighs in with an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in conjunction with the recent Wikimania conference. Excerpt: We have a variety of systemic biases, not in the sense of one-sided articles, but in that we write about what interests us. We have a fantastic article about the USB standard, but not much about the Congo Wars -- because we're Internet geeks. That problem has gotten better as we've grown and become better known. We've come out of the core free software movement and now have diverse contributors. In order to improve, we'll make the software easier to use. We also have projects within the community that identify the systematic biases and look for people to help. There's no magic answer. We have to find the right people to help us.

Fact-Checking Note for Future Editions of Long Tail

I like TLT very much and am recommending it to my friends. However, one thing jumped out at me from page 31:

On March 21, 2000, Jive Records demonstrated that clout by releasing No Strings Attached, the second album by *NSYNC, the latest and greatest of the boy bands. *NSYNC had been developed at an even larger label, BMG, but on the advice of its marketing gurus had switched to the urban-oriented Jive to get more street cred...

Blogging As Idea Curation

Drinking coffee, getting ready for work.

I like this Kottke post, entitled "How I Post." I echo this sentiment: When I'm deciding what links to post here, I'm essentially curating ideas, collecting them to "send" to you (and to myself, in a way). And unconsciously, these seven points factor into my decision on what to post here. (You'll have to click for the points.)

Sunday, August 06, 2006

We've become mashup/remix enthusiasts laterly. At the birthday party of a friend of ours last night, The ♥G♥ was telling some of our friends about the AC/DC-Kanye song she likes, and I don't think any of them understood what she was talking about. Here's a list of some stuff from a guy named DJ Schmolli well worth checking out, here's Banned Music, and here's Mashuptown. Also, take a look at the Wikipedia page for Bastard Pop.

I was looking for the Dewey Decimal Number for commercial shipping today (387.2, by the way) so I could put my books about ships in their proper place in the ever-improving book room, and I stumbled across this nifty rug for kids:

I'm looking forward to the DVD release of a movie that I don't think has ever been available in the U.S. (could be wrong) called Japan's Longest Day, about conflicts within Japan's military and political establishments in the days and hours leading up to their surrender at the end of WWII. The film is based on the book of the same name. Summary here. I'll make sure to record my impressions here when I see it.

Today I came across a copy of The Wicked History of the World by Terry Deary and Martin Brown. It's awesome! Where have I been that I haven't seen this? It's an illustrated children's book that has all these people throughout history shown doing what they actually did... namely, torturing and murdering each other! I hadn't realized that the concept has a pedigree, too.

Elliott White Springs, Man After My Own Heart

As Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple explain in their book Advertising in America, Springs relied on four principles. First, the reader was considered an intelligent peer, not an easy-to-titillate sucker. Second, a product benefit had to be offered once the reader's attention was gained through pulchritudinous means. Next, racy images should combine humour and respect — Springs' ads objectified men and women, although both retained their dignity. The final principle was the most important: The Tease was the most effective method of leveraging sex in an ad. An inch of stocking top worked far better than a topless woman.

Once the manufacturing facilities were in place, Elliott set out to make the Springmaid trademark a household name. He did it by using his gift for the English language, his irrepressible sense of humor, and his love for—guess what—wine, women, and song. He created a now-legendary advertising campaign that featured drawings of leggy, bosomy women supposedly dressed, to the extent that they were dressed at all, in Springmaid fabrics. His copy was full of double entendres and risqué innuendos.

“Protect your assets,” warned one ad that featured three showgirls backstage dressed in the miniest of mini-skirts. “Beware the goose,” suggested another, showing a farm girl startled by an aggressive gander. “We put the broad in the broadcloth,” offered a third. The most famous pictured a hammock made from a Springmaid sheet. In it, sinking into a blissful repose, is a young Indian brave. Stepping out of the hammock is a clearly satisfied Indian maiden. The headline: “A buck well spent on a Springmaid sheet.”

The Pooh-Bahs of the advertising industry were scandalized. Some of the prissier magazines, notably The New Yorker and Life, refused to run the ads. But the campaign did exactly what Elliott had hoped for: it made Springmaid a household name. He claimed that when his campaign began, Springmaid sheets were sold in only six retail outlets. A few months later they were sold in ten thousand and were soon the largest-selling brand in the country. (Note -- they're still in business.)

Loophole Response; Hitchens on Gibson; How to Make Working Gorilla Masks

Christopher Hitchens blasts off on Mr. Gibson's recent comments. Excerpt: One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Through a Scanner Partly

I've been cleaning out the book room some more lately (I'm up to rough Dewey order on the 300s) and I was looking at some of the neat stuff I have on the shelves. The thought occured that it would be fun to share some of it on the old blog, so...

Here are the front and back covers of my great-grandfather's geography textbook from 1886. (Info on 1855 edition here.) I had been meaning to play around with my scanner to capture some of these sorts of images, and after messing around with HP Photosmart Premier a little bit, voilà! I'm planning on posting other stuff like this in the relatively near future. (And I had thought my 20th-anniversary high school reunion this weekend drew on artifacts from a long time ago... P.S. -- Happy birthday, MTV!)